Mozilla Firefox’s new “Shake to Summarize” feature earned a spot on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025, allowing users to shake their phone to instantly summarize long web pages. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, general manager of Firefox, calls it a “testament to the incredible work of our UX, design, product, and engineering teams who brought this innovation to life.” Neowin reports: Shake to summarize works...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The City of New York is reaching across the country to sue tech giants headquartered in California over allegations that their platforms have created a youth mental health crisis. The city, along with its school districts and health department, alleges that “gross negligence” on the part of Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and ByteDance has gotten kids...

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed Questing Quokka, Ubuntu 25.10 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support and ships with the latest GNOME 49 desktop environment, defaulting to a Wayland-only session for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor, meaning there’s no other session to choose from the login screen. Ubuntu Desktop also ships with...

YouTube has launched a “second chance” program allowing some creators previously banned for COVID-19 or election misinformation to apply for new channels, as long as their violations were tied to policies that have since been deprecated. Bans for copyright or severe misconduct still remain permanent. The Verge reports: Under political pressure, the company had said last month that it was going...

The scientific Nobels announced this week — in Physiology or Medicine, Physics and Chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple yesterday announced a plan to comply with a Texas age verification law and warned that changes required by the law will reduce privacy for app users. “Beginning January 1, 2026, a new state law in Texas — SB2420 — introduces age assurance requirements for app marketplaces and developers,” Apple said yesterday in a post for developers....

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant’s new leadership. Speaking to press and analysts at Intel’s Tech Tour in Arizona last week, Kevork Kechichian, who now leads Intel’s datacenter biz, believes it’s time to rethink what Chipzilla contributes to the open source...

Doug Whitney carries a genetic mutation that guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late forties or early fifties. His mother and nine of her thirteen siblings died from the disease. His oldest brother died at 45. The mutation has decimated his family for generations. Whitney is now 76 and remains cognitively healthy. The New York Times has a fascinating long read on Whitney and...

In the Trump administration’s latest example of dialing back cryptocurrency enforcement, Roger Ver agreed to pay about $48 million to end a tax fraud case.

Dave W. Plummer, the Microsoft developer who created Task Manager and helped build Windows Product Activation, has revealed the origins of Windows XP’s most notorious product key. The alphanumeric string FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 was not cracked through clever hacking but leaked as a legitimate volume licensing key five weeks before XP’s October 2001 release. A warez group distributed the...

The Internet Archive must block access to books in its Open Library project for Belgian users after negotiations with publishers failed. A Brussels Business Court issued a site-blocking order in July targeting several shadow libraries and the Internet Archive. A Belgian government department paused the order for the U.S. nonprofit and urged both parties to negotiate. The talks over recent weeks...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the National Retail Federation challenging a New York state law that requires retailers to tell customers when their personal data are used to set prices, known as surveillance pricing. From a report: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said the world’s largest retail trade group did not plausibly allege that New York’s Algorithmic Pricing...

Intel today announced its Panther Lake laptop processors, consolidating the confusing split between Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips that define its current generation. The new processors use a unified architecture across all models instead of mixing different technologies at different price points. Panther Lake comes in three configurations. An 8-core model targets mainstream ultrabooks. A...